Attention! Blah Blah Blah

Hopeless; 2003

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Perhaps because a class clown is just a shy kid with different coping skills, the alterna-indie-underground has always had its share of satirical acts. Take The Dead Milkmen, The Dead Kennedys, or They Might Be Giants-- who had a really good song called "Dead"-- or browse the single-syllable branch, with representatives like Devo, Ween, and Cex. It's not much of a stretch to assume that Atom & His Package imagines himself a part of this genetic lineage, but his true mentor seems to be a comedy-rock star that shines a bit more brightly: parody king "Weird Al" Yankovic.

Now, far be it from me to front on The Al-- after all, I was an eleven year-old boy once. In fact, I still have an autographed ticket stub from a Weird Al show, a performance at a dinner theater at which I saw my first ever moshers during "Smells Like Nirvana". You might even say Al played a formative role in my musical development. No, let's not say that.

Unlike me, Adam Goren doesn't seem like he'd be too ashamed by the comparison. He's got the nostril-heavy vocals, he occasionally borrows a melody or two from the pop culture consciousness, and instead of an accordion, he's got the sequencer companion he calls His Package (clearly a statement on the technologicalization of sexual organs in our increasingly impersonal and technical lives. Or just a cheap laugh). He might avoid overt song parodies, but that was only half of the Yankovic catalog: the rest of his albums were filled out with, er, classics like "Nature Trail to Hell (In 3-D)".

On Attention! Blah Blah Blah, however, Goren is doing stand-up, with pretty limp material. Here's a song about marrying your grandma! Hey-o! Here's a song about why Atom doesn't want to have kids! Here's a song about smashing things with a hammer! I'm not totally averse to humor in music, but these jokes are sitcom-bad, and especially disappointing given that Atom has been reasonably funny in the past: the way "Punk Rock Academy" inexplicably becomes an Eddie Money cover halfway through, or the spot-on, caffeinated, Le Tigre-referencing rant of "If You Own the Washington Redskins, You're a Cock".

The closest to thing to "If You Own the Washington Redskins" on Attention is "The Palestinians Are Not the Same Thing as the Rebel Alliance, Jackass", which never gets funnier than that doozy of a title right there. Two minutes of breakneck-speed anti-war protestor mockery that scores a couple valid points, it falls flat as satire, and Atom can't help but cut himself with double-edged statements like, "You people who generalize are all the same!"

Compounding these problems, Attention shows Atom & His Package isn't even as musically compelling as he's been on previous outing, and he wasn't all that compelling to begin with. Where Goren once offered up a welcome slice of synthy levity between bands at a thousand over-serious emo shows, he now sounds like he's auditioning for the next Blink-182 tour, coating nearly every song with crunchy pop-punk guitar glaze. Capable, not-quite-Postal Service moments of programming-- the pizzicato strings of "Friend, Please Stop Smoking" or the epileptic rhythms of "Possession (Not the One by Danzig)"-- are lost beneath the Nü-Weezer metal riffing.

The sad fact is, a project like Atom & His Package suffers from the They Might Be Giants quandary: the more it sounds like a real band, and the more it takes itself seriously, the worse it becomes. Essentially, this means Atom & His Package is painted into a corner of stagnation, doomed to repeat himself with the musical editorials and danced-up Mountain Goats covers that got him this far. But hey, chin up, Atom-- doing the same thing over and over again has given "Weird Al" Yankovic a long, virtuous career and a killer episode of Behind the Music-- you could be next!